Exhibitions
Crafts Center exhibitions include creative works from students, local artists and crafts guild members.
Exhibitions are on display throughout the year at the Crafts Center’s R. A. Bryan Foundation, Inc. Gallery and in the Street Gallery Windows. The windows usually display instructor examples for upcoming classes, craft guild exhibitions and works by Crafts Center artists and craftspeople.
Gallery exhibitions are supported by NC State University Foundation.
Exhibitions are open for viewing during normal Crafts Center hours as listed on our Calendar page.
In the R. A. Bryan, Inc. Gallery
Spring 2023
Bailey Knight: Colors from the Earth
An exhibition of naturally dyed woven artworks.
Exhibition: January 9 – April 20, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, January 20, 5:30 – 8:00pm
Read the January 24, 2023 Technician article about this exhibition
Bailey Knight combines her technical knowledge of textiles with her passion for the earth by hand-dying each thread using natural resources and creating textile artifacts through the language of weaving. She creates her work with traditional fibers and colors that are born from the earth, exist in our natural world for a period of time, and will one day return to the earth through natural degradation, The work in this exhibition serves as an homage to the beauty of this moment in the material’s life: once dirt, plant, yarn, dye, but now a spectacle.
Every moment in time is fleeting, and every moment of the past is what has created the present moment of the now. Bailey captures this moment in her material’s impermanence and shares the opportunity to appreciate the change of color over the woven grid and the space of time. The color seen today will slowly fade and change over time. The color seen by one person is not necessarily the color perceived by another. Simply by pairing a red yarn and a blue yarn within the woven grid, as opposed to a red with and orange yarn, the red is seen as a different hue.
Similarly, our perception of color changes as we age through life, as human perception is not fixed, and we are also creatures of degradation. Like these materials, we are also navigating life on earth before we also return to the ground.
Weaving is a special language for telling this story. Within the woven cloth, it is the intersection of threads that creates the fabric. The yarn follows a “code” – over, under, under, over – which acts like a DNA sequence for the final cloth. Bailey takes this as an opportunity to make each textile one-of-a-kind with its own one-of-a-kind color sequence. Depending on where you stand, you may see small patterns within the interlacement of threads, or you may see a larger pattern across the face of the fabric.
When approaching these artworks and understanding what they have been in order to be what they are now, take a moment to understand your own form in this moment: you are very molecule that you have ever been, and ever will be, all at once.
About Bailey:
Bailey Knight was born in Raleigh, NC, attended the College of Design at NC State University, and most recently graduated from the Wilson College of Textiles in December 2022. All of the work in this exhibition has been made during her time as a student at the Wilson college of Textiles, using technology at the college or in her personal studio. She has been an artist in the Bonded Llama Artist Studio Collective since 2018, and began teaching community-based workshops in 2017. Since then has shared the beauty of natural color and plants with people in Raleigh, Black Mountain, Greenville, and Brevard, North Carolina.